Nokia needs something different to combat the iPhone. Their latest technology shown off by the Nokia Research labs might be just the thing: it’s a tech that is designed to create imprompty WiFi mesh networks for chat and media sharing. It’s pretty interesting.

Called the Nokia Instant Community System, the technology automatically creates ad-hoc WiFi connections between nearby devices, with each device acting as a repeater that could conceivably fill up a large space like a stadium or entire building.

Initially, the Nokia Instant Community System just includes group text chatting and photo and video sharing, with media shared as links. Because ad-hoc networks can get slower for devices in the middle of the chain, especially when pumping through video, the Instant Community System will fall back on regular WiFi networks if they are available.

Nokia is aiming the system at sports or concert events. The idea is that the audience could share recordings, photo and video of the event in real-time. I don’t really see that happening, but imagine attending a geekier event like CES or Maker Faire with phones capable of creating this sort of ad-hoc network. That would be crowdsourcing at its finest.

The best news about the Instant Community system is that Nokia doesn’t intend on keeping it proprietary: they want other companies to adopt it into their own devices. That means that we don’t need to imagine the impossibility of a Nokia-controlled smartphone space to imagine this technology being useful: it might, someday, work on our iPhones too.